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Tuesday, May 3, 2011

The Hadrosaur Gallery

Time to open ART Evolved's newest Time Capsule: May's Hadrosaur Gallery!

Hadrosaurs - or more publicly known as duckbill dinosaurs - have been found in North America, South America, Asia, Europe, and Antarctica. They were the cows of the Cretaceous - large, herding, plant-eating dinosaurs, with mouths full of teeth behind broad beaks! Hadrosaurs were the most advanced types of ornithopods by the late Cretaceous, having evolved into two different groups: Lambeosaurinae and Hadrosaurinae.

Lambeosaurinae hadrosaurs include the hollow-crested and short-beaked Parasauolophus, Olorotita, and Corythosaurus. Hadrosaurs in Hadrosaurinae include the larger and broad-beaked Edmontosaurus, Gryposaurus and Saurolophus. Join us as we celebrate all things Hadrosaurs! Scroll down to view all the beautiful duckbill artwork. Click on the images to enlarge them.

If you wish to participate in the gallery and have your artwork displayed here, send your work to us at artevolved@gmail.com.

From the underground we are looking the walk of an adult Hadrosauroid dinosaur with his chick. We can also observe the footprints left from the two animals. Unfortunately, from this point of view we can't determine what kind of species is.

A huge bull hadrosaur attempts to frighten off an interloper to his magnolia grove in a Lance Formation forest. The bull is based on specimens usually referred to Anatotitan copei, while the smaller individual is based on the "Trachodon mummy" specimen usually referred to Edmontosaurus/Anatosaurus annectens. The skin texture and inflatable nasal structure are also based on evidence from the "mummy" specimen. All Lancian hadrosaurs are probably growth stages of a

single species, the oldest available name for which is Thespesius occidentalis.

The curse of the deinonychosaurs ("raptor" dinosaurs) is this: they are so cool that some people think they can kill anything, or at least any plant-eating dinosaur. We see this in TV programs like Clash of the Dinosaurs and Jurassic Fight Club. I've even seen it in some children's books on dinosaurs. I love deinonychosaurs, too. They are among my favorite dinosaurs, but dinosaurs are real-life animals, not sci-fi monsters. This is especially absurd when we talk about troodonts or basal dromaeosaurids - every inch of their anatomy shows they chased after smaller animals. Troodonts may have even eaten some plants. Eudromaeosaurs (derived dromaeosaurids), including Velociraptor mongoliensis and Deinonychus antirrhopus, may have been able to manage slightly larger prey, especially if they were group hunters, which is debatable. However, this doesn't mean they're going to attack something hundreds of times their size like a half-grown sauropod (giant long-necked plant-eating dinosaur) or a large hadrosaur (duck-billed dinosaur). Yet, there really are media out there that show them doing this, or claim that they're capable of it. No kidding.

This is two Gryposaurus having a bit of a squabble and the medium is ink, pencil, and crayon. I don't recall ever having seen any illustrations of interspecies fighting among hadrosaurs but obviously they did - all animals, even the "harmless" herbivorous prey animals, fight for mating rights, food, or social status.

Bear in mind I'm still just an enthusiastic noob - please, for the love of godzilla, let me know if I make mistakes!

Edmontosaurus, with a juvenile Byachychampsa alligator in the forground on a dead dinosaur.

That brings us to the end of May's Hadrosaur Gallery! We hope you like it! If you want to participate and you are a little late, or you have just run across this post and you want to submit, just send in your art to us at artevolved@gmail.com.

After an intense battle between time periods and paleoenvironments, the topic of the next Time Capsule will be the Carboniferous Time Period! This gallery opens July 1st, and as it is the summer, and many of us are on holiday and lounging on the beach, this topic is hopefully an easy one to submit to. If you want to paint a terrestrial amphibian, paint a terrestrial amphibian. If you want to sketch a giant fern tree, sketch a fern tree. If you want to 3D model an arthropod, 3D model an arthropod!

Can't wait to see what the palaeosphere artists come up with this summer! Send in your Carboniferous art to artevolved@gmail.com.

6 comments:

Your blog is outrageous! I mean, I’ve never been so entertained by anything in my life! Your vids are perfect for this. I mean, how did you manage to find something that matches your style of writing so well? I’m really happy I started reading this today. You’ve got a follower in me for sure!

Highlights are so many I won't bother to type them up (as it'd basically be like retyping up the post :P)

The one piece I do have to do a hat tip too is the very original and innovative POV for Santino's "Walk this way". I love this perspective on Dino footprints, and hope tons of scientists spring to commission more works like this from Santino! It is very communicative, eduactional, and best of all accessible for anyone and everyone on how we study fossil footprints, and know what we do about the walking of these animals.